The use of touch-sensitive surfaces as input devices for computers and other electronic computing devices has increased significantly in recent years. Exemplary touch-sensitive surfaces include touch pads and touch screen displays. Such surfaces are widely used to manipulate user interface objects on a display.
Exemplary manipulations include adjusting the position and/or size of one or more images or viewing images that are associated with an album of images. Exemplary user interface objects include digital images, video, text files, audio files, icons, and other graphics. A user may need to perform such manipulations on user interface objects in a file management program (e.g., Finder from Apple Inc. of Cupertino, Calif.), an image management application (e.g., Aperture or iPhoto from Apple Inc. of Cupertino, Calif.), a digital content (e.g., videos and music) management application (e.g., iTunes from Apple Inc. of Cupertino, Calif.), a drawing application, a presentation application (e.g., Keynote from Apple Inc. of Cupertino, Calif.), a word processing application (e.g., Pages from Apple Inc. of Cupertino, Calif.), a website creation application (e.g., iWeb from Apple Inc. of Cupertino, Calif.), a disk authoring application e.g., iDVD from Apple Inc. of Cupertino, Calif.), or a spreadsheet application (e.g., Numbers From Apple Inc. of Cupertino, Calif.).
But existing methods for displaying and navigating through content are cumbersome and inefficient. For example, using a sequence of mouse-based inputs to select a representation of content and view the content associated with the representation of content or drill down through a hierarchy of content using many discrete inputs is tedious and creates a significant cognitive burden on a user. In addition, existing methods take longer than necessary, thereby wasting energy. This latter consideration is particularly important in battery-operated devices.